Vibe

(many things to ask of this: emergence in the 1960s? semantic unfoldment? etc.)

Vibe coding came into my ken only recently, and this showed up 8iii25:

what is the "vibe" in vibe coding? Rob Horning (see Wikipedia)
There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half" because I'm too lazy to find it. I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works. (Andrej Karpathy)

...This all-theory, no-practice attitude posits a sort of rain-dance approach to creation in which one tries different "random changes" without worrying about "comprehension."

...When I first saw "vibe coding," I assumed it was pejorative, meant to mark it off from "real coding," where the coder understands how the code is put together. I was thinking of how vibe was being used back when it was described certain TikToks, as evoking a feeling that can't be pinned down in words, or a claim that couldn’t be substantiated with data. Then it was a general word for a mood or a feeling; it seemed to mean the opposite of "having an idea," insofar as having ideas also means being able to slot them into causal relationships. Vibe indicated an inability to analyze a certain situation that is accepted instead as a gestalt, a mystic whole.

"Vibe coding" retains the implication that you can't explain or even understand how something works. But under the pressure of AI hype and its championing of incomprehension, there seems to be not a "vibe shift" but a "vibe" shift occurring, as the term drifts toward a different connotation. Where vibe once conveyed something that can't be analyzed, now it conveys a purposeful indifference to analysis or explanation, as well as to the components that make up something. It is as though the preponderance of vibe talk made explanations irrelevant in all cases, and now we speak of vibes to forbid comprehension, which would be unfun.

"Giving in to the vibe," then, means deliberately refusing to understand, as though that would be to defy AI’s supremacy. One should let AI handle the data and the details so that you can just have gratified impulses, which are ultimately just a matter of data being manipulated to your liking— prompting, waiting, tweaking, and trying again until you are satisfied or bored with what you're doing. Being involved with the thinking process, the details, would be to go against the vibe. It's a superfluous burden that sets you against the spirit of the times.

So of course we ask the OED about vibe:
and
vibe, v. 1968— intransitive. To be inspired by or get a positive feeling from a piece of music or (fellow) performer; to improvise or perform on the basis of this
hmmmmm... not the full flavor. Ask some other dictionaries:
...a person's emotional state or the atmosphere of a place as communicated to and felt by others. "a lot of moody people giving off bad vibes"
(Oxford Languages)

...the mood of a place, situation, person, etc. and the way that they make you feel:

(Cambridge Dictionary)

...a distinctive feeling or quality capable of being sensed (Merriam-Webster)

Vibe check: what does the most overused word of our era actually mean?

...The thought that a person could give off "vibes" was a niche, mostly hippy concept...

A "vibe" can be an idea, a message, a connection between two people, an atmosphere, "off", unquantifiable, a sensation as clear as the weather. Dressing nicely is "a whole vibe"; a "vibe shift", as popularised by a 2022 New York Magazine article, is a coming cataclysm.

...without anyone intending it, the popularity of "vibes" threatens to make it mean nothing. Jessi Grieser, an associate professor in linguistics at the University of Michigan, said that "vibe" had undergone a process known as linguistic generalisation, where its meaning had slowly expanded.

...There is undoubtedly value in having a word for the unquantifiable. The German word "Zeitgeist" was loaned into English, in 1848, perhaps precisely because it encapsulated what we were missing before "vibes". A classically German compound noun, it literally means "time-spirit", and the broader German concept of "Geist" itself is maybe even more modern-day vibes-ey — combining to make "Volksgeist" ("national spirit") and "Weltgeist" ("world-spirit").

..."Sometimes, it's enough to say that a particular behaviour decision isn't 'the vibe'."

Nick Herbert: ..."One of the most important events in the history of vibes was James Clerk Maxwell's theoretical discovery that light is an electromagnetic wave vibrating in a narrow spectral band, implying that there are other EM waves invisible to humans vibrating at frequencies higher and lower than RGB," he said. "I would guess that the notion that we live in a vast ocean of invisible radio waves was one of the main inspirations for vibes, for 'getting on the same wavelength', for 'being in tune'.

Synonyms at Merriam-Webster

...ki, qi, chi, ch'i.. mana ...aura ...élan vital...

another explanation on TikTok